News Brief

May 18, 2007

A UCLA scholar won a $1.5 million prize for a three-year project on the impact of the Holocaust on American literature. The Mellon Foundation Award presented to English and literature professor Eric Sundquist is America’s largest in the humanities. Sundquist, 54, argued in his study that English-language books are largely responsible for Americanizing and universalizing the Holocaust in the world s consciousness. He is described by colleagues at Columbia and Harvard universities as “the most productive American literature scholar of his generation.” His book “Strangers in The Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America” won the Weinberg Judaic Studies Institute Award last month from the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania.